Increase Freighter Speed to 30

    I was perusing the Ship list and something caught my eye that I honestly thought was a typo...


    Freighter Speed: 3


    Can someone explain to me how that was a good idea, much less got through testing without any blowback whatsoever? We only have so many ships to move resources at a time and therefore time is a precious resource. Not every account has Poseidon at their disposal or a Sea Archive in every town(build slots are still a premium you know) to reduce trip duration. Before Freighters came along, the slowest ship in the game was the Balloon Carrier at a meager 20. That's slow and anyone thinking of having a Navy has at minimum Poseidon, if not a Sea Archive as well for that very reason. Most combat Ships have a speed of 40 while Mortars, Rockets and Tenders have a speed of 30. I think it would be more than fair to set Freighters at that speed or at bare minimum 20, matching Carriers. It's not like we can have tons of them right away as it requires building Dockyards in every single town and upgrading them substantially to get any meaningful amount of them and considering late game upgrades require Millions, if not BILLIONS of resources, it would be preferable that we not wait an eternity for a shipment to arrive. Otherwise, your pushing rule is going to need a massive update considering how long Freighters take to do a shipment of any meaningful distance(god help people who spread out their Empire, much less Trade with Freighters...). I understand Rome wasn't built in a day, but Freighter Speed is simply dumbfounding.


    Also considering the sheer volume of goods being moved around by Freighters, I'd also argue for a 4th Naval Slot to get Dual/Triple Ports and/or buffing Hermes Wonder(mirroring it after Athena or 160%/240%/400% at levels 3 to 5 respectively). Yet that's for another topic.

    You did see though, that Freighters are able to transport 100x the amount of ressources of a normal trading ship?

    That's the one you need to compare it to, not warships.


    They transport 100x as many ressources, while trading ships are 20x as fast as a Freighter.


    In other words, you can transport with 1 Freighter 5x the amount of ressources, compared to 1 normal trading ship.

    You also only need to have the poseidon/hermes active once, making it way easier and comfortable to utilize these bonuses.


    They're incredibly good and surprisingly cheap, the gold costs barely go up compared to the normal trading ships and the dockyard also doesn't rly go crazy after a few levels.

    Also if you don't have a Poseidon and ship-speed is an issue for you, you should ask yourself "why no Poseidon?"

    Obviously each their own strategy, but then you have to live with the disadvantages.

    The brilliant part about freighter is that, while their speed is low, you can scale their capacity much, much better compared to regular trade ships. That makes their capacity to transport goods way more powerful compared to regular ships.


    I have a capacity of 140 freighters, which gives me a working capacity of 7 million resources.

    With Poseidon and Triton boosts, I can pretty much guarantee an arrival time of 3 days or less, no matter how far away my cities are (and trust me, mine are literally scattered over the whole world map).

    With 430 regular ships, it would would take me 32.5 transports in a time span of 3 days, which would be impossible to execute in my situation. Not only because I need to sleep and work, but also because it takes a minimum of 3 hours to move resources from one city to another (maxing at eight per day at best).


    Of course, some disclaimer: I'm at the phase where I need to move 55 million resources for a governor residency, so I just send and forget about it until it arrives. With regular trade ships that would take me 255 movements. With freighters, slightly less than eight full journeys.

    If they did get a speed boost, I'd like to see it tied to a futures research. I honestly feel like research is an underutilized feature in Ikariam and I'd love to see a way to unlock more types of future researches.

    Solid arguments have been made. I’m well aware of Freighter cargo capacity. 100x capacity but 20x slower. Therefore they come out ahead once your Freighter capacity reaches five times your Cargo Ship capacity(190k x 5 = 950k or 19 Freighters, more if you bought Phoenician ships). My point though is that there will come a time, particularly if your Empire is spread out, where you will wish the base speed of Freighters were just a tad higher and this is independent of whether you have Poseidon or not. I don’t count Triton Engines as that’s a premium feature. Judging this purely from what an average non-premium player can do. Even if the base speed was bumped to 5, ideally 10, it would make a world of difference as I see it. 30 may have been too high but I find the current value of 3 to be too slow.

    I mean sure, technically we always want things to be faster, cheaper and be straight up better.

    Personally I just think Freighters are already very strong, why buff them even more?

    Right now you have to choose between more Freighters or more Trading ships, which seems kinda ballanced to me.


    Also most of us are probably still very far away from having 100-300 Freighters, which are realistically achivable with huge accounts in a few years and way less then the current maximum amount of 1090 Freighters.


    So currently the problem of "Freighters are not fast enough" can still be solved by "just buying more of them".


    I wouldn't mind small upgrades by f.e Researches or achieved otherwise, that would atleast require someone to do something and have a trade-off, which imo. would be more interesting then a straight up buff.

    I ship plenty of goods long distance and have 80 freighters. Would I like them to be fast of course but I think it is fine how it is. They are cheap enough that you can build and buy lots of them.

    It is not necessary to increase the speed of the ships. It is enough that they allow the transfer of large amounts of resources, I can now transfer 2 million resources to any of the cities in 6 hours, it is ideal. If you take it and start counting, you will see that the number of tours of ordinary ships would be identical to the time freighters travel in relation to the amount of resources you transfer.

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    1 Freighter is 50k versus 500 for a regular ship.


    An island to island trip with no sea map archive is 20m for the regular ship, 400m for the freighter.


    The regular ship could make 20 trips for 10k goods while a freight could transfer 50k.